A Brief Analysis on the Color-coding of Terror

Depending on where you look, the definition of a mass shooting is either two or more or four or more victims killed or injured (aside from the shooter). A Google search will tell you a terrorist is a person who uses unlawful violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims (although other sources say that the motive does not always need to be political to be an act of terror), and that domestic terrorism is the committing of terrorist acts in the perpetrator’s own country against their fellow citizens.

So let’s play a game.

Which of these men is a domestic terrorist who demonstrated a mass shooting?

Trick question! Omar Mateen and Dylann Roof, by definition, are both domestic terrorists who demonstrated a mass shooting. Both are Americans, both were driven by hatred, and killed in the name of that hatred. So why is the way we rememeber their crimes against humanity so different?

Omar Mateen’s affiliation with ISIS was made explicitly clear in an article by CNN, and because of these affilliations we easily call Omar Mateen a terroist, domestic or otherwise. But after a couple days of researching, I can’t find a single article or archival source that labels Dylann Roof as a domestic terrorist, only “mass shooter and white supremacist”. This isn’t to say the those titles hold less weight than “domestic terrorist”, but when you notice that white men are never called terrorist, you being to wonder if white men can even be terrorists. If you ever found yourself wondering this, the answer is yes, they can be.

The word terrorism has evolved since it’s coinage during the Reign of Terror, a period of time when the government, actually, was putting people to death during the French Revolution, but there is no question that it still evokes imagery of death and fear. In the 1920’s, during the Al Capone era of gangsters, newspapers actually used terror and terrorism as a way to describe gangsters, despite their motives not being political.

Before Dylan Roof was even identified as the shooter, Police Chief Gregory Mullen is quoted saying that the shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church was a hate crime, and we know for a fact that Roof had intentions of starting a race war when he atacked the church, yet it’s hard for the nation to swallow the idea of a white domestic terrorist. Omar Mateen and Dylann Roof were both fueled by fierce hatred and had political motives, and yet only one of these malicious men gets “domestic terroist” in the first line of their wiki page.

Since the year 2000 there have been over 200 schools shootings in the United States; that includes primary, secondary, high school, and universities. Since the year 2009 there have been nearly 200 mass shootings, including over 30 highly publicized mass shootings.I’m still going through the list of names, but from 2009 to 2012 I cannot find another person who is labeled as a terrorist, domestic or otherwise, when you search their name.

Stay tuned, as I will update this as I find new information.

Update:

Tyler Peterson, then 20-year-old Sherrif’s Deputy, motives not political and so not a terrorist by definition. I encourage you to read the article on his crimes and see how detailed it gets about his life in contrast to the CNN story on Omar Mateen.